Our goal was to count the number of tiles of an interval of the discrete line. When we exhibited a close formula for these combinatorial objects, we computed the first terms of the sequence and figured out it already was in the Encyclopedia without any interpretation for it. The sequence was pointing to R. Zumkeller, who gave a program to compute it. So our main result was to give a meaning to this sequence: for an integer n, it is the number of tiles of an interval of length n of the discrete line, Z. We gave two proofs of these results. The second proof shows that two sequences of the Encyclopedia coincide: entries A067824 and A107067, which is our second main result. The latter gives the number of polynomials with coefficients in {0, 1 } that divide the polynomial Xn−1.

This page is also available in PDF format
here and the related publication
is there,
corresponds to reference [1], which was published
in LNCS volume 4009.

Here, we define the notion of tile. One considers a space to tile, in
our case, the space is the discrete line: Z (i.e., {−∞,
…, −2, −1, 0, 1, 2, …, +∞}). Let A be a subset of
this space. Then A is a tile, if there is another subset B
such that A + B = Z, where A + B denotes { a + b : a ∈ A, b
∈ B }. B is called the dual or the translate of
A. B is the set of positions in the space where to put copies of
A to cover the whole space. As the definition is symmetrical, B is
also a tile.

In general, the sum of two sets yields a multiset, i.e., a set
in which some elements occurs more than once. It is not the case for a
tile. Thus to denote this instead of A + B = Z one writes:

Let A, B subsets of Z with A finite. Newman [5]
proved in 1977 that if A ⊕ B = Z then B is
periodic, i.e., it exists k ∈ N such that B = k + B
. Moreover, he showed that the period k is smaller than
2d( A ), which enables one to check in exponential time whether
a pattern A tiles Z, where d( A ) denotes the
maximal element of A. However, in all known examples, k
≤ 2d( A ) (Nivat's conjecture) [4]. A
periodic tile is given in Example 1.1.

We define a notion of self-periodicity of a pattern (a set that
is not necessarily a tile). This concept is the pendant of the notion
of period for words (or see a text in PDF format). Let n ≥ 0 and f be a pattern such that
d( f )<n.

Definition 1
Let p be an integer such that 0 ≤ p ≤ d( f ).p is a self-period of f for length n if and only if for
any i ∈ [0,n−p[ one has

i ∈ f ⇔ (i + p) ∈ f .

Let Πn( f ) denotes the set of self-periods of f, and
πn( f ) its smallest non null self-period.

It means that any tile of the interval [[n]] can be decomposed as a
sum of completely periodic tile of a shorter interval. This
decomposition is also known as Krasner factorization
[3], also see [2, 7]
for more information.

From this, it is possible to enumerate the set, Ξn, of all
tiles of [[n]] and we obtained a reccurrence formula for
ξn, which denotes the number of tiles of [[n]], i.e., the
cardinality of Ξn.

Theorem 2
One has ξ1 = 1 and

ξn

= 1 +

Σ

d ∈ N : d ∣ n, d ≠ n

ξd .

Note that if n>1 is prime then Ξn = { { 0 }, [[n]] } and

δn = ψn = 1 and ξn = 2.

The values of ξn for n > 0 are those of Sequence entry
A067824
in [6], and (2) corresponds to the recurrence
relation given for this sequence by Zumkeller. Using the Moebius
inversion, one can easily derive another induction formula for for
ξn:

We also exhibit an algorithm to recognize if a set f given as input tiles any interval. The algorithm also gives the smallest interval tiled by f, as well as the decomposition of f as a sum of completely self-periodic tiles. It runs in linear time.

Theorem 3
Let f be a pattern. Our algorithm
decides in O(d( f )) time whether there is n ∈ N such that
f tiles [[n]] and gives the decomposition of f in completely
self-periodic tiles.